Working Class In Britain Research Articles

Culture and the Working Class: Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters

Abstract In his work as a playwright, Lee Hall not only explores dramatically the troubled relationship between culture and the working class in Britain. He also seeks to challenge the stereotyped images of the working class in the media as being feckless, inarticulate and incapable of engaging in any cultural production on their own terms. In this paper I examine the ways in which this encounter between the working class and ‘high art’ is depicted in the film Billy Elliot (2000) and the play The Pitmen Painters (2008), both written by Lee Hall. In these portrayals of a working-class boy’s struggle to become a ballet dancer and of the collective efforts of a group of coal miners to express themselves as fine artists, I discuss how far Hall has succeeded in subverting received working-class stereotypes and what are the broader political and aesthetic implications of his cultural depictions of these coal-mining communities.

The gardens of the British working class

This magnificently illustrated people's history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers' cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played--and continues to play--an integral role in everyday British life.

Andrew August (ed.), The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. 4 vols. Vol. I: Home and Community, xlii + 497pp; vol. II: Work, xxiii + 464pp; vol. III: Culture, xxv + 399pp; vol. IV: Power, xxii + 370pp. Bibliography. Index. £350/$625.

Andrew August (ed.), The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. 4 vols. Vol. I: Home and Community, xlii + 497pp; vol. II: Work, xxiii + 464pp; vol. III: Culture, xxv + 399pp; vol. IV: Power, xxii + 370pp. Bibliography. Index. £350/$625. - Volume 41 Issue 1

The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914. Edited by AndrewAugust. 4 vols. Pickering and Chatto. 2013. 1856pp. £350.00.

The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914. Edited by AndrewAugust. 4 vols. Pickering and Chatto. 2013. 1856pp. £350.00.

Victor Horsley (1857–1915) and National Insurance

The Liberal government in 1911 was determined to improve the health care of the poor and working class in Britain. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, introduced a National Insurance Bill before Parliament without consulting the medical profession. The doctors were furious but Horsley, a progressive liberal, was firmly in favour of a national health service and vociferously supported the bill. This led to a series of acrimonious meetings that did not enhance the reputation of the profession and alienated Horsley from his colleagues.

"The aboriginal people of England"

This article explores the legal precedent of the case of Mandla versus Dowell-Lee (Mandla v Dowell-Lee 1983) to explain how the far right British National Party mobilizes ethnic strategies and specifically the category of “indigenous Britons,“ to turn post-colonial multiculturalism on its head and thereby disavow the realities of a post-industrial, multiracial working class in Britain. The article argues that the historical moment in contemporary Britain is characterized by a shift away from the politics of social class toward collective organization and sentiment based on ethnicity and cultural nationalism. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, conducted between 1998 and 2000 on the post-industrial Docklands of Southeast London, the article explains an exceptional local area case study, which proves the rule about the growth in influence in the first decade of the twenty-first century of far-right politics in post-industrial urban areas of Britain.

“Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption”: The Chartist Press Reports the Empire

Although the Chartist movement is often seen as focused on domestic reforms, Chartist newspapers and journals of the 1830s and 1840s extensively commented upon various aspects of the expanding British empire, including slavery and abolition, Christian missionary activity, emigration policy, and the colonial wars of the era. t his essay argues that the Chartist press developed wide-ranging criticism of several facets of the colonial system, describing the empire as "the outworks of the citadel of corruption," an integral part of the hierarchical structures which disenfran - chised and impoverished the working classes in Britain. t he Chartist press appropri -

Contrasting cultures of contraception: birth control clinics and the working-classes in Britain between the wars.

Contrasting cultures of contraception: birth control clinics and the working-classes in Britain between the wars.

Culture as Action

Culture as Action

Variations in socialism: The rise of a political labour movement in Britain and Germany

The first political movement of the working class in Britain was the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Historians regard it as a failure as it came to an abrupt end in 1850. The equivalent of Chartism in Germany was the Allgemeine deutsche Arbeiterverein (ADAV) founded in 1863. This initiative is regarded as a success by historians since it turned out to be the seed of the German Social Democratic Party, which in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries served as a political model for British as well as other European socialists. This article deals with the puzzle that contemporaries had a different judgement of the two movements, the Chartist movement was regarded as the political model, and German socialists tried to imitate it. This was particularly obvious with the ADAV's leader, Ferdinand Lassalle, who wanted to link up and continue the Chartist tradition, as can be seen in the many parallels in the propaganda of the two organizations. If the People's Charter was a 'fork and knife question' for the Chartists, Lassalle called the social democratic demands a 'Magenfrage a stomach question. And just as the popular Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor wanted to help unemployed workers to become peasants by means of a state credit of a hundred million pounds, so Lassalle assured his listeners that a state credit of a hundred million taler was enough to get all German working people productively employed in cooperatives. To what extent Lassalle based his appearances on those of the gentleman agitator O'Connor would make a good subject for a case study. He had clearly studied

The Remaking of the British Working Class 1840–1940

Mike Savage and Andrew Miles provide a comprehensive introduction to the working class in Britain in the years after 1840. This textbook: * Includes a provocative, timely and clear defence of class analysis * Breaks new ground in showing how social mobility and urban change affected working class formation * Demonstrates how the history of the working class is politically reconstructed * Shows how class and gender interact in mediating social and political change

The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class

Linking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a 'struggle for the breeches.' The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity, the sexual division of labor, and sexual mores, changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history. Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness, Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire, Glasgow, and London, she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers, demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies. Workers faced a 'sexual crisis,' Clark claims, as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability, others might be homophobes, wife-beaters, and tyrants at home; a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women, instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class.

Love and toil: motherhood in outcast London, 1870-1918

The feisty warm-hearted mum has long figured as a symbol of the working class in Britain, yet working-class history has emphasized male organizations such as clubs, unions, or political parties. Investigating a different dimension of social history, Love and Toil focuses on among the London poor in the late Victorian and Edwardian years, and on the cultures, communities, and ties with husbands and children that women created. Mothers' skills in managing the family budget, earning income, and caring for their children were critical in protecting households from the worst hardships of industrial capitalism, yet poverty or the threat of it molded intimate relationships and left its imprint on personalities. This book is also a case study demonstrating the larger argument that the concept of motherhood is more socially and historically constructed than biologically determined. Shaky household economics, pressure toward respectability, the close proximity of neighbors, the precariousness of infant and child life, and little chance of better lives for their children shaped the work and emotions of much more than did the biological experiences of pregnancy, birth, and lactation. This beautifully written book, embellished with Cockney slang and music hall songs, addresses fascinating questions in the fields of women's studies, labor history, social policy, and family history.

Reviews

Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200‐1540Michael Aston, David Austin, and Christopher Dyer, eds., The rural settlements of medieval EnglandMark Bailey, A marginal economy?Peter Earle, The making of the English middle classChristine MacLeod, Inventing the industrial revolutionC.W. Chalklin and J.R. Wordie, eds., Town and countrysideG.E. Mingay, ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, vi, 1750‐1850R.A. Buchanan, The engineersCharles More, The industrial ageT.M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison, eds., People and society in Scotland, I, 7760‐1830Anne Digby, British welfare policyPatrick Brantlinger, ed., Energy and entropyJohn Benson, The working class in Britain, 1850‐1939Patricia Hollis, Ladies electA.M. McBriar, An Edwardian mixed doubles. The Bosanquets versus the WebbsA.D.M. Phillips, The underdrawing of farmland in England during the nineteenth centuryCharles F. Harvey and Jon Press, eds., Studies in the business history of BristolS. Fisher, ed., Innovations in shipping and tradeLaurie Dennett, Slaughter and MayPenny Summerfield, Women workers in the Second World WarDavid Thorns, War, industry and societyAlec Cairncross, ed., The Robert Hall diaries, 1947‐1953Henry Pelling, Britain and the Marshall PlanJohn Walter and Roger SchofieldJonathan I. Israel, Dutch primacy in world trade, 1585‐1740Herbert Kisch, From domestic nwnufacture to industrial revolutionRichard Lawton, ed., The rise and fall of great citiesIan Blanchard, Russia's age of silverOrlando Figes, Peasant Russia, civil warWilliam M. Mathew, Edmund Ruffin and the crisis of slavery in the old southHarvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the tableMira Wilkins, The history of foreign investment in the United States to 1914Gary Gerstle, Working‐class AmericanismErick D. Langer, Economic change and rural resistance in southern Bolivia, 1880‐1930Colin Newbury, The diamond ringT. Dyson, ed., India's historical demography

Total War and Social Change

World War I and women in France, J.F.McMillan World War I and the working class in Britain, A.Reid the social consequences of World War I- the case of Germany, W.J.Mommsen the social consequences of World War II for the USSR , P.Dukes World War II and social change in Germany, M.Roseman World War II and social change in France, F.Bedarida women, war and social change - women in Britain in World War II, P.Summerfield.

Book reviews : The making of the black working class in Britain By RON RAMDIN (Aldershot, Gower, 1987). 626pp. £35.00

Book reviews : The making of the black working class in Britain By RON RAMDIN (Aldershot, Gower, 1987). 626pp. £35.00

British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833-1865 (review)

182CIVIL WAR history While the letters include short comments on such current events as the 1863 draft riots in New York, they are slim pickings for subjects other than the Whitman family and engineering matters. Although it was edited with loving care, it is not a book for the general scholar of nineteenth-century life in the United States. IronicallyJeffWhitman, who is little remembered today, gained a national reputation before his more famous brotherbecame well known. As the editors point out, the publication of these letters will very likely provide the only biography ofa man who made substantial contributions to his profession and whose closeness to our greatest poet merits recognition. Larry Gara Wilmington College British Unitarians against American Sfovery, 1833-1865. By Douglas Charles Stange. (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Pp. 259. $29.50.) British Unitarians against American Sfovery, 1833-1865 is the first significant monograph concerning the reaction of a British religious denomination toward American slavery and the Civil War. Although British Unitarians trace their beginnings from c. 1660, they numbered probably no more than sixty thousand, some two hundred years later. Generally speaking, the British Unitarians were a well-educated, affluent, articulate, and influential group. They were, as were their coreligionists in America, associated with a variety of reform activities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among those issues which elicited their support were women's rights, education, suffrage, temperance, antislavery, and others. Stange implies that a possible motive for their interest in reform was an effort to gain "status," a motive also ascribed by some to American reformers both before and after the Civil War. One reform activity which these affluent humanitarians shunned was seeking changes that would alleviate the poverty and despair, and would improve the quality oflife for the industrial working class in Britain. They devoted their attention and energies to a problem thirty-five hundred miles from their home (the abolition ofslavery in the United States) rather than to social and economic problems in Lancashire and other nearby places, because "slavery was the crime above all crimes" (147) in western society. The response of British Unitarians to American slavery was similar to that of the abolitionists in the United States; they were divided into moderate and radical or Garrisonian factions. The focus ofattention in this study is on the British disciples ofWilliam Lloyd Garrison. Their activities included writing antislavery tracts and books, publishing sermons and editorials which denounced slavery, circulating abolitionist petitions, and book reviews183 sending antislavery resolutions to their coreligionists and others in the United States. By 1855 the antislavery activities of British Unitarians were declining. One oftheir ablest spokesmen died that year; also by this time a number of British abolitionists had given up hope ofredeeming America from the sin ofslavery. With the new Fugitive Slave Act, violence in Kansas, the defeat of Freemont, and the Dred Scott decision—it seemed to many in Britain that the slave power was firmly in control in America and would probably continue for an indefinite time. The author claims that during the Civil War most Unitarians, as well as others in Britain, were neutral; however, he notes one Unitarian clergyman who advocated that the British government recognize the Confederacy . The Emancipation Proclamation elicited a mixed reaction, but the defeat ofthe Confederacy and the addition ofthe Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution stimulated British Unitarians to undertake activities designed to help the American freedmen. Although this study is sympathetic to the British Unitarians, it is not uncritical. It offers an encapsulated history of the Unitarian movement in Britain and of their leading spokesmen, together with an account of their interaction with American Unitarians in the antebellum years. It is a welcome contribution to an understanding ofBritish church history in the nineteenth century and to the transatlantic antislavery movement. It is hoped, and expected, that Stange's monograph will stimulate similar ones pertaining to other British churches. W. Harrison Daniel University ofRichmond Grourtng Up in the 1850s: TheJournal ofAgnes Lee . Edited by Mary Custis Lee DeButts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Pp. XX, 145. $11.95.) Eleanor Agnes Lee, the fifth child ofRobert Edward Lee and Mary Anne...

Popular Conceptions of Mobility

The British working-class has proved a grave disappointment to those people who hoped it would overthrow the inequalities of capitalism and help to usher in the classless society. Far from rejecting the central tenets of a capitalist society, as many early Marxists had anticipated, the working-class in Britain has often been portrayed as supporting these tenets and adhering to principles which are inconsistent with ideas of equality and classlessness. The extent to which the working-class does accept the unequal manner in which scarce resources are distributed in contemporary Britain is of course an empirical question and one which admits of no easy answer. The debate continues on whether such acceptance reflects support for, or merely acquiescence in, social inequality.1 But no special studies are needed to show that the working-class has not opposed the existence of inequality with an intensity sufficient to end inequality, and it is both interesting and important to consider why this should be so. Why has the working-class failed to institute an equal society when it can plausibly be maintained that equality would be of benefit to the working-class? In this paper, I want to examine one particular reason why the working-class in contemporary Britain may be less egalitarian in outlook than anticipated. This is the role played by social mobility in influencing the attitudes of the working-class to inequalities of reward. It has often been argued that extensive movement of people of working-class origins into middle-class positions reduces the opposition of the working-class to inequalities of reward.2 Upward mobility, the argument runs, siphons off those working-class people whose ambitions, if frustrated, might take the form of organizing opposition to the status quo ; it gives the working-class a stake in society by holding out the prospect of upward mobility, if not always to them, then at least to their children; it helps to persuade those among the working-class who are not upwardly mobile that this is their own rather than society's fault; and, finally, it prevents society from dividing into a number of closed and exclusive classes between which there is little contact and much hostility. For all these reasons, social mobility is thought to act as a suppressor of social conflict and to contribute to the process through which the working-class is incorporated into the existing social structure.